LinkedIn Makes Volunteering a Critical Part of the Professional Profile

At VolunteerMatch, we’ve always known that volunteering and service can give a prospective employee an important edge in the job market. Giving back, particularly with one’s expertise, not only demonstrates soft skills like caring, commitment, and leadership, it also can lead to the development of new talents and important new additions to one’s professional portfolio.

That’s why we’re excited to share the news that LinkedIn has just released some important new features that elevate volunteering in the professional world. Through the social networking service’s new Volunteer Experience & Causes section, individuals can now share the causes they care about and the organizations they support.

Most importantly, they can now highlight relevant volunteer experience at nonprofit organizations, including the skills and functional areas in which they worked. And when that work was with an organization that has a Company Page at LinkedIn, the name of the organization becomes a hotlink over to that organization’s Company Page. So discovery and awareness is only a click away.

As one LinkedIn team member put it, “That’s right, LinkedIn is putting a stake in the ground that volunteerism can and should be a part of everyone’s professional brand.”

We couldn’t agree more. Over 120 million professionals and some two million companies and organizations currently use LinkedIn – making it by far the largest social network focused exclusively on professional life. While the full impact of these new features is yet to be determined for volunteers, nonprofits and companies with volunteer engagement programs, there’s no doubt that it will be big.

Keep an eye on this blog in coming days…. We’ll delve deeper into the new Volunteer Experience & Causes functionality at LinkedIn and what it may mean for your work. In the meantime, Twitter users may want to follow @LinkedIn4Good for updates on how LinkedIn is connecting talent to opportunity to change the world.

About The Author

Shari Tishman

Shari led Online Marketing and Communications at VolunteerMatch from 2010-2015. After working with nonprofits for 9 years, she moved over to the corporate sector and is now leading Inbound Marketing for a tech company in San Francisco.

7 Comments

synthlgSeptember 25, 2011

Thanks for the link to Llinked In Edit Volunteer Experience and Causes section – but not sure how to find it or direct people how to get there from within LInked In – can you please provide the navigation – thanks!

synthlgSeptember 25, 2011

Found it – its under main profile box.
Add sections to reflect achievements and experiences on your profile.

This is great news, even if we might all wonder why it seems like such a revelation that people’s volunteering is as important to their employablility as are the paying jobs they’ve held. In fact, what someone does as a volunteer says so much more about his or her passions and beliefs — important factors in hiring, I would think. But this also raises the need for leaders of volunteers to encourage volunteers to include their community service on their resumes (and help them to do this well). Here’s a new article for the public about that idea: “Volunteering May Help Your Career More Than You Think” at http://tinyurl.com/43rm874. Also, Mary Agnes Wilson wrote an article for the Energize site on “Helping Volunteers to Market Their Experience on Their Resumes” at http://www.energizeinc.com/art/resumes.html.

Thanks for sharing these excellent articles, Susan! Indeed, just because the new field is there doesn’t mean volunteers will use it! We’re encouraging all nonprofits to remind their volunteers what a great tool this can be.